Bush-era whistleblower claims NSA wiretapped Barack Obama in 2004

Thursday, 20 June 2013 21:33

A former National Security Agency analyst and a Bush-era whistleblower has revealed that the government’s warrantless wiretappings extended to many high-ranking officials, including then-Senate candidate Barack Obama in 2004.

Russ Tice, speaking on The Boiling Frogs Show, said Wednesday that the NSA had ordered surveillance of a wide range of military officials, lawmakers and diplomats including Obama, The Huffington Post reports.

"Here's the big one ... this was in summer of 2004, one of the papers that I held in my hand was to wiretap a bunch of numbers associated with a 40-something-year-old wannabe senator for Illinois," the former intelligence analyst said. "You wouldn't happen to know where that guy lives right now would you? It's a big white house in Washington, D.C. That's who they went after, and that's the president of the United States now."

In 2005, Tice unmasked himself as the source of a New York Times’ report on the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping of telephone communications in and outside the U.S.